Learner-centered teaching and effective faculty professional development

At the 2008 Joint Conference POD/NCSPOD conference (Reno, Nevada, October 22-25, 2008) learner-centered teaching and effective FPD were central topics. Let me share with you how this relationship was explored from different perspectives .

Learner-centered teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dennis C Jacobs shared in a plenary his ideas about "learning as a community endeavor". He illustrated how he has exploited collaborative learning and the use of clicker technology to simultaneously engage 200 students in making scientific predictions and defending their ideas; he shared research findings demonstrating that collaborative learning pedagogy led to greater student success and engagement among students at risk. He also shared his experience concerning learner-centered scholarship of teaching and learning, which has fine tuned tenure track requirements with effective teaching initiatives.

Learner-centered new faculty orientation. Networking is an outstanding resource, as you know; at the POD conference I was able to meet with different people interested in new faculty orientation. My conversations with Bonnie Mullinix from The TLT Group helped me realizing that the POD innovation award 2006 was given to Edward Nuhfer for his "Interactive Engagement Model for New Faculty Orientation" initiative which contrasts with content-centered new faculty orientation programs.

Learner-centered preparation of TA--teaching assistants. A Topical Interest Group on "Graduate Student Professional Development"--GSPD--at the POD conference brought my attention to the importance of helping TA assume their role having students' learning as the focus of their efforts. Based on feedback from TA and faculty members attending to open forums about their participation in their GSPD program, one higher education institution reported that efforts focused on helping TA acquire instructional skills were considered less effective to prepare prospective faculty members as learning facilitators than their active participation in reflective communities of practice among TA and mentors around student-centered learning problems. In the first case TA were required to attend to at least 70% of periodic teaching and learning sessions where they reflected on the topic of the day; in the second case TA were immersed in the preparation, implementation and evaluation of learning activities in collaboration with their mentors, as well as in the documentation of their learning process with a teaching portfolio. This institution considered that moving from a preservice content-centered to an inservice learner-centered GSPD model produced a significant change in TA preparation for teaching and that is worth doing, regardless it is demanding and difficult to sustain.

Learner-centered academic development. Tom Angelo shared his ideas about seven key concepts that he considers powerful "levers" to transform our thinking and practice to improve student learning. It is interesting his advocacy of "academic development" (AD), which includes both organizational development and FPD, since it recognizes the importance of aligning institutional strategies with FPD strategies; also it is interesting his focus on becoming scholarly learning communities both at the organizational level and at the classroom level. Reviewing his contributions I found two previous papers that will help exploring in more detail his thoughts: Angelo_1999, and Angelo_2000.